Abstraction

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Abstractions are more than mental shortcuts—they exist and have real causal power over physical objects. Information theorists discovered this through a counterintuitive principle: by deliberately abstracting away from the source of information and the "meaning" of symbols, they created something with remarkable versatility. "It is the abstraction from details that gives the breadth of application," they understood.

The theory gained power precisely because it wasn't weighed down by specificity. Like a skeleton key designed to open many locks rather than a custom key for just one, abstractions achieve their greatest utility when they capture essential patterns while remaining unburdened by particular meanings.

The philosopher David Deutsch extends this insight further: when your computer beats you at chess, "it is really the program that has beaten you, not the silicon atoms or the computer as such." That program—an abstraction—has been instantiated in neurons, radio waves, memory banks, moving unchanged through different physical substrates. "The specifics of that chain of instantiations may be relevant to explaining how the program reached you," Deutsch writes, "but it is irrelevant to why it beat you: there, the content of the knowledge is the whole story." The explanation requires referring to abstractions in their own right.

Therefore those abstractions exist, and really do affect physical objects in the way required by the explanation. Abstractions aren't just useful fictions—they're real entities that shape the physical world.